


Between Familiar Dimensions

by SpiritusRex



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Michael as the Archivist and Jonathan as the Spiral, Roleswap, when you meet the guy who stole your job (insert meme of spiderman pointing at spiderman)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-16
Updated: 2018-11-16
Packaged: 2019-08-24 08:07:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16636097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpiritusRex/pseuds/SpiritusRex
Summary: Michael Shelley finds himself being stalked one night by something that shouldn't exist.





	Between Familiar Dimensions

It isn’t until he’s nearly home that Michael realizes a man has been following him the entire time. From the moment he left the Institute to this very street, the man has been a constant shadow.

He tries not to show that he’s aware of his stalker now, though he’s sure the stumble in his step _must_ have tipped the man off. Michael knew he always had been too clumsy for his own good. After he stumbles, he makes an impulse decision to turn right, down an alley he’d been planning to pass. Whatever the man wants, Michael doesn’t want to think about right now. It had been a long day in the Archives, and all he wants is to get back to his bed so he can sleep; if he loses the man in the back streets of London row houses and apartment buildings, then he’ll be free to go home without worry.

At least, that had been the plan.

Michael manages to shake the man off a few turns after the first, though he also seems to have gotten himself lost in the process. His quiet little flat feels like it must be miles away by now, as he tries to retrace his steps and yet keeps finding himself just going down alleyway after alleyway. His feet are falling on cobblestone and cement walkways that begin to repeat themselves, and yet all look the same. The building walls seem higher than they had been, their edges nearly blotting out the stars and moon.

Something in the back of Michael’s mind trembles at his disorientation, points its fingers at a few of the statements he’d recorded out loud not even a week ago. It shakes his subconscious, and screams something about-

“A doorway?” He breathes, staring at the sickly yellow door with a pitch black handle that rests nestled into the brick of a dead end. He hadn’t seen it at first, sure that there had only been a flat wall where the door now stood, but now that he’s seen it, he can’t seem to pull his eyes away.

Home, his initial destination, is written over in his mind by something else. All thoughts of rest melt and drip away as curiosity pushes in and fills every inch of Michael’s thoughts.

Breaking into people’s homes unannounced isn’t something Michael ever thought he’d end up doing, and certainly not so late at night, but that type of worry feels… empty. It feels lesser. Lesser, compared with the burning need to Know what is behind the yellow door that has so suddenly and thoroughly consumed all of his senses.

Michael rests his hand on the black handle. His fingers twitch and curl around it, and then he opens the door.

He comes face to face with the man who he’d only seen from the corner of his eye until that moment. Before he can really register any distinct features, somethings large and _wrong_ feeling grasp his shoulders and tug him into the eerie hallway beyond. The door slams behind him, and then it is just Michael, the man, and a long, dimly lit hallway.

Michael knows without turning that the doorway is gone, but he turns anyways. Only a mirror hangs there, the form of it straight but the reflection it shows is wavy and distorted like that of a mirror that belongs in a circus fun house. He sees his own familiar long blond hair framing his own familiar face, but his cheeks are red with dried tears that he can’t remember crying.

Then Michael looks over his shoulder, at the man who had dragged him there.

The man looks very un-man-like now. His tan skin is stretched disgustingly tight over a form that is too tall, too thin. Cracked square glasses hang off of a long nose and a flat face that has just a _slight_ twist to it, in the center, where underneath a wide smile hangs as if pinned at the corners. His hands are probably the worst of all though. They dangle, heavy and large, at the sides, stretched to nearly the length of the man’s already uncomfortably long torso. All his bones seem to be in his hands, pushing at the skin, pinching it tight over his fingertips until they are _sharp._

When Michael turns, he expects the man to look normal again, like he had on the subway when Michael had first noticed him sitting a few seats down. He’d looked handsome then, with premature grey streaks in pitch black hair and squared shoulders. But no, the man’s form stays stretched and horrifying, as well as far - _too - close._

“W-what do you want from me?” Michael whispers, the words strangled in his throat by fear. He presses himself against the mirror, and mirror Michael’s eyes overflow with tears.

The head tilts, twitches, clicks on neck bones too long for a human neck, into a mockery of an inquisitive gesture, “Too good for introductions, _Archivist_?” It - for Michael knows better now than to think this thing a man - asks, through its clean stretched smile.

It says _Archivist_ like the title is a curse, like it’s a blessing, like it’s a rotten piece of meat in its mouth that it _must_ chew around or else it will die.

And it hates every bite.

“I’m- I’m Michael Shelley.” Michael says. He doesn’t dare hold out his hand. “Head Archivist at the Magnus Institute, and you a- ?”

“Jonathan.” It says, cutting off his question, catching Michael off guard with the very _human_ name.

“J-Jonathan?” He whispers.

Jonathan laughs at him then, teeth opening ever so slightly to let out the frightening, echoing sound. “You do not Know, then?”

“Know wha-”

A finger, sharp and fast, slides through Michael’s skin like a hot knife through butter. The mirror behind him shatters, spider-webbing out from the place where the point of Jonathan's finger had stretched through the bone of Michael’s shoulder and pierced the glass.

Michael tries not to scream.

Tries.

“No questions. Not from _you_ .” Jonathan says, still sounding amused. “You really _are_ just a baby of an Archivist aren’t you? No idea of the blood on your hands, on _her_ hands.”

Michael says nothing, pinned like he is, like a bug under a microscope. He desperately wracks his brain for the statements about madness, about figures with odd bodies, about lies. Any bits of information from the depths of his memory that could possibly help him now are welcome.

“I wish I could kill you.” Jonathan says. “I _want_ to kill you.”

Something overcomes Michael then. Weakness? Fear? Anger? Compulsion? “Why _don’t_ you?” He stutters.

Jonathan pauses. His finger slides out of Michael’s shoulder. Blood doesn’t gush dramatically like Michael had expected it too, but a wound like that still must bleed. The red soaks the shoulder of his shirt and coat quickly.

Michael tries not to think about how Martin will probably try to stop him from entering the Archive while injured like this. Tries not to think of Martin, or Sasha, or Rosie, or his chipped teacup in his office, or the old tape recorder that hums almost comfortingly to him while he records statements, _at all_ . He tries to empty his mind of _everything._

Jonathan holds his shoulders again with his wrong hands. “Because.” He says, slowly, as if the answer is being dragged out of him, “Because that is what _Jonathan_ wants.” his glasses slip, and Michael catches a look at dark grey eyes, the pupils distorted and swirled.

And now, he is more confused than ever, “Wh-”

Jonathan bodily slams Michael against the broken mirror, _“No more questions.”_ Jonathan whispers. Roars. He drops Michael, lets him crumple and bounce to the ground like a crushed soda-can.

“You never stopped to look around you while in your precious Archives did you? Not at what _she_ was _truly_ doing.” Jonathan rages through laughter, sounding furious and frantic and amused somehow all at once. “Never looked at the researchers on the fringes, never looked beyond your shelves of books and saw that she was _using_ us all.”

The hallway around them bends and buckles. It brings to mind the word _digestion._ Michael, on the floor, feels like he’s going to be sick.

“Now you bear her mantle, her sins. And you don’t even _Know_.”

Slumped to the side, Michael feels the edge of a wooden doorway with the tips of his fingers.

“ _That_ is why Jonathan wants to kill you. You. Don’t. _Know._ ”

His wounded right arm is as good as useless, but with his left Michael reaches up and grasps the handle of the door he’s slumped against. Jonathan lets him.

_“But I,”_

The door falls open, Michael tumbling into the darkness beyond it.

_“Do.”_

He lands in the same hallway as the one he left. Green wallpaper, pale yellow carpet, black rug running down its center. There is no undulating motion to the walls or floor, and the air is unnaturally silent.

Jonathan is nowhere to be seen.

Michael wheezes, winded by his fall, but he pulls himself to his feet.

Jonathan is still somewhere in here, Michael knows this, but he’s not sure he Knows it. He forces himself to begin walking, slowly, down the hall. It’s not exactly the brisk pace that someone being chased by an otherworldly monster should be moving at, but Michael really just wants to take a moment to himself, try to process all that’s happened in the short time since he’d gotten off of work for the night. He knows how foolish he’s being.

Gertrude used to tell him all the time, after all, how foolish he was.

Of all the Archive Assistants, Michael was the one she seemed to like the least. Though, then again, Gertrude hadn’t seemed to like _anyone._ Still, it was almost bittersweet that he was the one who had taken up her position when she’d disappeared.

Elias had said he was suited for it.

Michael, with a choking lump in his throat, fleetingly wishes now that he’d turned the position down. There's something attached to it that he knows nothing about. 

He passes another mirror as he walks, and notices his own form seems stretched and wiggly, like the mirror itself is wiggling back and forth. A picture frame hanging on the wall ahead shows an image of a giant eye, and another one beyond that shows a large and reaching hand.

The frame beyond that _also_ shows a large and reaching hand, but this one is slightly longer, slightly more distorted. The frame beyond that shows the hand in another stage of distortion, then there’s another, and another, until Jonathan’s hands are reaching through picture frames on either side of Michael’s head down the hallway.

 _Now_ he’s running, finally moving at an appropriate pace for someone being hunted. Twisted mirrors and spiralling fractals that haunt the walls fly past him as Michael flees the outstretched fingers. He can almost feel them grabbing at his neck, tearing at his skin as they try to pull him back into the intestines of that hellish hallway.

“ _Run back to your Archive, false Archivist.”_ Jonathan’s voice wraps around Michael, his form suddenly silhouetted, menacingly, at the end of the hall. It can’t seem to stay still, flickering and twisting like a flame. _“Tell them that Jonathan Sims sends his regards.”_

A mirror and wall replace Jonathan, as if Jonathan had never been there at all. Michael doesn’t have enough time to slow himself, and Jonathan’s phantom fingers release him just before the impact.

He crashes into the glass arms first

And then falls through.

The split second before that though, he sees himself reflected. His own body is stretched and thin, hands bloated and inhumanely large, and a smile is cutting open his jaw. He sees himself in Jonathan’s place. He sees himself as an entity of the Spiral.

The cold stones of the streets of London knock him out almost immediately when he hits them.

* * *

 

Click.

_“Michael are you sure you want to do this, it’s alright if you take a few days off you know! There’s no one around for you to impossibly try to please anymo-”_

_“Sasha, Sasha just- I’m fine I… I need to get it out. This has nothing to do with Gertrude…”_

_“... Michael?”_

_“... or maybe it has_ everything _to do with her.”_

_“... What do you mean?”_

_“... I just want to give my statement Sasha. You don’t have to hover while I do it, I can do it on my own. I’ll still be alive when you come back.”_

_“If you’re_ sure _you’ll be alright.”_

_“I am. Thank you for worrying though.”_

_“If you need me or a cup of tea from Martin, we’re right outside your door you know.”_

_“I know.”_

Footsteps, the squeak of a door hinge,

Silence.

_“... Deep breaths, Michael, deep breaths._

_………_

_Alright, get it over with you big baby. You absolute fool. Just- Just say the damn words just-_

_………………_

_Just, tell what happened.”_

A deep breath.

_“Statement of Michael Shelley, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London, regarding a… an encounter with the entity once known as Jonathan Sims, ex-research assistant at the Magnus Institute. Statement taken direct from subject._

_Begin statement:”_

**Author's Note:**

> i jokingly said in a group chat "roleswap au with michael and jon. jon gets the yaoi hands now." and then i took myself too seriously.
> 
> this was my first try writing for The Magnus Archives, after a long stretch of writers block for Literally Everything, and thus it ended up shorter than i feel like it could've been and probably with some weird narrative holes! Maybe ill revise this fic or explore this au more in the future, bc I really enjoyed writing in the TMA world. Please let me know your honest thoughts!


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